Boardgaming in 2018!

I love that game. It’s like what happens if you take the Resistance and make it 3 hours long, with lots of BSG flavour. Literally everything is good about that.

You should join a forum game again; you’ve not played since GAME 1 or so?

If there’s a jerk in the room, he’s going to ruin a social deduction game more than he’s going to ruin a game based on rules instead of player dynamics. The cap for how good the game can be is set by the level of whoever’s being a jerk.

In other words, only play social deduction games with your friends, and only with those who can play them graciously. Otherwise you run into situations like @Infested_terran described. In @David2’s situation, he seems to think he was the jerk, but it reads to me like the problem was the guy who was sullen because he didn’t understand the game and wasn’t playing well.

-Tom

Okay, I think we’re on the same page as far as our feelings about those games, your wording just confused me.

Yeah, re-reading what I first wrote confuses me, too. Pithy is hard! Just ignore my first post and only read my reply to you.

-Tom

This is my rule for all board games!

Got to try Root tonight. Despite knowing Patrick Leder, I wasn’t tapped to playtest this one, so this was my first encounter with the game. It was a bit of a wobbly one to learn with the “learn to play” document leaving out some important details and not explaining the reasoning behind any of the scripted choices, and of course the massively asymmetric choices, but we did enjoy ourselves and enthusiasm was present for a second go-round. I won as the Vagabond, probably because I was allowed to go largely unchecked, but both the Cats and the Eyrie came very close to Domination victories. I also didn’t end up aiding people much as they didn’t craft for me and there were easier ways to gain points. Basically I scurried around and explored and quested and crafted my own tools, with one guerilla strike on a nearly undefended Cat recruitment center (one guard = one crossbow snipe, and then a free hand at sabotaging the buildings) earning me a single retaliatory clawing. And then I was the only one in a position to deny the Eyrie control of a third Mouse clearing, so I charged in, sniped a bird warrior, crafted Brutal Tactics (the defender VP mattering not at all to one who’s shifted to Domination), and slaughtered the entire clearing worth of birds with my two swords, gaining like six points in a single wave of carnage. Suddenly people took notice. Then the Cats went for a Bird Domination, which I was not in a position to stop (the nearby clearing being packed with half their army, and the original Eyrie roost that the felines had conquered being too far away)…but I definitely was in a position to craft a fourth Sword, butcher an entire clearing worth of Cats and their buildings, and then do an errand for the local foxes for a win. If I’d needed to I could also have gotten to the Cat Keep and used three swords worth of Battle to farm some more points, but I thought it was a more amusing end to just deliver someone’s groceries.

Yeah! Dark Moon is a complete waste of time all on it’s own.
But Wolf, it’s same game as BSG in a fraction of the time! Except that there is no tension. The bad guys can pretty much just trash the ship unopposed. I wanted to like that game so much since it was originally BSG Lite, but it was just terribly boring. I’d rather play One Night.

That said, I still don’t understand people who like Secret Hitler but hate Avalon and Resistance, it’s the same game. Although I do like yelling in public places that people are fascists.

BSG I still think is the best. Yes it’s long, but I love the tension it builds. I love that the game is an active player working against you. I love that it’s not just silly pointing fingers (which I’m okay with). There are times people do things in that game because they have to (expansion stuff) and not because they’re cylons. That game captures the feeling of the show incredibly well. And if you’re stuck in the brig for an entire game you’re either not playing right or the cylon player is playing extremely well. That said I know I’m in the minority on these boards, but hands down one of favorite gaming experiences.

I think Tom had brought up Homeland a while ago. The thing I like about Homeland is that there’s competition even amongst the good guys. Even if you are not the Terrorist or Opportunist you have reason to sabotage each other.

Say what? Dark Moon is basically streamlined BSG (like you said). The theme isn’t quite as cool, but still pretty good on its own. And I like that it can be set up faster and has a shorter play time (good to avoid long term frustration in the brig, for example).

It’s not quite as intense, but I’m not sure how you can love one and consider the other a waste of time.

I have an expansion for it I haven’t tried yet (Dark Corporation maybe?). I’m looking forward to see whether it adds anything interesting on my next play.

I haven’t tried Dark Moon in person at all but the forum version felt very bland to me. I thoroughly enjoy the CraigM/Knightsaber BSG games here at Qt3 though. Nothing like a nice juicy BSG game spread out over the course of a couple months.

I can’t argue with that. The characters, setting and struggle for survival are more evocative in BSG, especially if you have seen the show.

I personally find that, with the right group, the meat of the game is still present in Dark Moon. But I can see how it might not work as well for others.

I checked and this is the expansion I own:

Not sure whether it would address some of those blandness concerns. I’m looking forward to giving it a try.

Got to play my first game of Brass Birmingham. I liked the original Brass, but haven’t played it in several years. This has the same basic flow (you play a card for every action, you take two actions per turn, etc). Building is basically the same (you have to transport coal over links, but iron teleports; you have location and industry cards). Developing is the same. There are two new industries, pottery and the vague “manufacturies”.

But selling works quite differently. You don’t build ports in this game. The ports are on the map, but the goods they are willing to buy is determine randomly at the start of the game (by use of tokens). So you have to make sure your industry tiles are hooked up to those locations, and then you need beer(!) to sell from your industries. Each port has a free beer available (which actually gives you a bonus if you use it), but after that you have to use beer produced by breweries that the players build. A few industry tiles don’t require any beer, most require one, and a few require two.

Also there are wild cards, and you can expend an action to acquire one wild industry card and one wild location card. This helps smooth out some of the luck of the draw (although of course it’s still best to luckily draw the cards you need instead of having to spend an action to get the wild cards).

A minor rule change that I quite like is that the rule where you’re not allowed to take loans in the Rail Age is gone (along with the fact that money is no longer with anything at the end of the game). This (hopefully) makes the game a little less prone to massive analysis right before the end of the Canal Age. Also, if you want to build two rails for a single action, in addition to the increased cost, you need a beer. So the typical play in the original Brass where you take two loans at the end of the Canal Age, then build 4 rails at the start of the Rail age isn’t necessarily a good play in Birmingham, and in fact will probably not usually even be possible because the beer probably won’t be available.

In our game, for some reason, we all ended up building a few of the industries that require two beer, so there ended up being a beer shortage. I got crushed, but the other two players were fairly close. I quite enjoyed it, hope to play again soon.

I don’t think that’s how the rule goes in original Brass. Isn’t it that you can’t take loans once the deck is empty, i.e. in the last four rounds?

Personally, I love that original rule. But it adds a second major inflection point to the game, something for everyone to plan and play around. It’s not just about people doing a bit of counting to see how much money they’ll need for the rest of the game. It’s about everyone losing tempo in the game at that point, and trying to pressure people into mistakes around it. For example forcing an opponent to spend an action on the board instead of on taking a loan, and then have to play the miser for the rest of the game.

I think you’re right, I misremembered. While I see your point that it is a thing to plan around, it still seems kind of gamey and can unnecessarily penalize people for a small planning mistake.

Yeah, I quite like Birmingham. I think it’s just a slightly more “open” game with more choices. A lot of this has to do with the map design, which makes sense more quickly than Lancaster ever did. I also like how they’ve done a great job of making the 2 player game work simply by how the map is designed.

New games this week:










Gen7 is out! I’ve been wondering about that.

It’s a much heavier box than Dead of Winter with a price point to match ($99.99 MSRP). I’m waiting to see some reviews before I pick it up.

I just got Marvels Strike and expansion! Came out 1 day early to my local brick and mortar store. So excited to get this to the table…a gloomhavenisque marvel superhero game with the avengers and the Agents of Shield (ard and May and the rest).

The developer was mentioning that the X-Men would be the next expansion if the game does well…